Building Trust in Social Advertising Through Dynamic Ads

Crazy in Love grew to adopt a simple but effective social advertising strategy that now generates a considerable return on investment with Dynamic Ad DA campaigns on Facebook.The project started with an unsettling comment—“Client has excellent knowledge of search advertising, has little confidence in social.” We had our hands full. If the CPA spiraled out of control, Crazy in Love would instantly lose any temptation to test Facebook advertising.

Baby Steps

During initial meetings, Marin wanted to impart knowledge, so we explained the rules, techniques, and skills involved in Facebook advertising.

For starters, we ran a simple campaign structure with a conversion objective prospecting a 1% lookalike of the website’s website visitors. A simple campaign structure and objective would allow the Crazy in Love team to learn the basics.

After achieving moderate results (10% greater than target CPA), they were willing to test a similar structure across two other markets it was advertising in. We saw similar results.

A Growth in Confidence

As the client began to better understand how to optimize social ads, it became quite transparent that the social spend was generating revenue. Although we weren’t yet hitting the target CPA all the time, we were floating within 10-20% of our target across three markets.

Conversations shifted to Dynamic Ads, and how effective Dynamic Ads campaigns are in achieving a low CPA. After a week or so of working closely with the team on its product feed, and ensuring the Facebook pixels were correctly installed at each touch-point of the purchasing path, we launched DA in one market.

Since the particular market has significant web traffic, the results were instantaneous—we succeeded in decreasing the CPA by 66%.

Scaling Up

With DA successfully set up in one market, it once again provided a learning environment for Crazy in Love. Our account rep touched base a couple of times a week, suggesting change recommendations, offering a coherent reason every time, and building their knowledge.

Luckily, as the campaigns indicated a sound ROI, Crazy in Love pushed to self-educate and took every recommendation on board. At this stage the client was running Facebook campaigns for four months, and it became clear that it trusted that with successful optimization and strategy, there was a high chance of achieving a valuable ROI.

Testing and Lessons Learned

Crazy in Love's CPA was a purchase, so that became the focal point. To ensure top-notch DA campaigns, we taught them about the need to ‘feed’ our retention audiences. They understood the theory—however, because a purchase conversion was the main objective, they decided to use conversion campaigns as prospecting ‘feeding’ audiences.

Although conversion objective campaigns achieved some conversions, the total number of clicks weren’t enough to ‘feed’ our DA product audiences on Facebook. The DA CPAs started to spiral out of control, and as the client stumbled into the Christmas shopping period, it was noticeable that the campaigns weren’t being given the same care and attention. Ad scores began to fall, and frequency, CTR, CVR, and CPA all began to spiral.

The ads were becoming expensive. It was time to realign the strategy and ensure adequate optimization time.

Getting Back on Track

After agreeing that conversion objective campaigns were not optimum for ‘feeding’ DA campaigns, they agreed to test an outside traffic objective, in an attempt to drive more traffic with more clicks.

As the DA CPAs began to spiral we decided to rebuild our DA campaigns. This provided an opportunity to analyze attribution windows, to align retention days for optimum results.

By running Lookalike Prospecting campaigns with an Outside Traffic objective across all markets, we drove considerable traffic to the website that was later picked up by the DA setup. The results were excellent.

The Grand Finale

To highlight the success of this strategy we compared the data from Q4 2015 and Q4 2016. We noted an 86% increase in conversions, with a 400% decrease in CP purchase (€60.35 to €11.97).